Joe Arpaio Punks the Feds Yet Again?

The feds let themselves get played by this guy? What the hell's wrong with them?

Delay, delay, delay. Thow up legal obstacles. Thumb your nose. Hold out till what seems like the last minute. Appear to compromise. Start all over again, and never give anything up unless you absolutely have to. Even then, you can always keep the worst stuff back.

This is the shell game Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his minions play on a regular basis, either with the county, people suing the MCSO, or in this latest case, the U.S. Department of Justice's year-plus civil rights probe into Arpaio & Co.

Last week, after the DOJ-imposed deadline passed on the MCSO allowing access to all the docs, facilities, and employees the DOJ wanted, the DOJ blinked and agreed to a meeting with Arpaio's peeps rather than sue. It looked like a punk-out then, not just a last minute reprieve.

"Both sides entered Tuesday's meeting skeptical that anything would come of it. But what was expected to be a brief meeting inside the main Justice Department building turned into a two-and-a-half-hour `back and forth,' as one of Arpaio's lawyers, Bob Driscoll, described it.

"`I think we made great progress,' said Driscoll, a partner in firm Alston and Bird's Washington office. `I wasn't incredibly optimistic, but we've said all along that if the Department was willing to articulate what they were investigating and define what they were looking for, we'd respond to reasonable requests. And to a large extent they did that today.'

"A Justice Department spokeswoman, meanwhile, said her department is `hopeful that today's meeting' will `prove productive,' insisting the department's `goal all along has been to gain voluntary compliance' with its requests."

Um, "voluntary compliance"? You want voluntary compliance from a guy who held a press conference in July of last year announcing that he would not cooperate with you? Arpaio stonewalled for another year, forced the DOJ to send him a letter threatening legal action if he didn't comply by August 17, then let that deadline pass?

So the DOJ buckles, agrees to a meet with Joe's DC mouthpiece, and lets him slide once more.

They should start calling Joe the "Teflon Don."

No wonder our geezer gendarme has zero respect for the federal government and the law. Based on this latest evidence of the feds' lack of spine, I may stop paying my taxes.